The ezPalm Blog

Internet worms.

Is your PC infected?

If your computer has become infected with a worm, don’t panic, it is not the end of the world.

There area number of things that you can do.

Microsoft has a security web page.

www.microsoft.com/security/default.mspx

It offers up to the minute information on the latest security threats and worms. It also provides you with all of the tools to dig out the worms and fix any damage that they may have caused.

I expect that most of you are saying that you already have protection. May I ask a question?

“Is it up-to-date?”

We all know that virus protection is essential. The trouble is that a lot of us have not updated our virus protection software since we purchased our computer possibly three or four years ago.

The chances are that it is completely useless against the latest threats.

I am using AGV anti virus. I have found it to be totally reliable. There are other programs that I expect are just as good. Zone alarm also has a very good reputation, so does F-secure. Go to Google and type in “anti virus programs” and you will get more results than you could shake a stick at.

You only need one of these programs on your computer at one time. More than one and they tend to get confused and anything could happen.

Whatever program you use, be sure to keep it up-to-date. There are new viruses coming out almost on a daily basis. Try to get an update at least once a week. It’s always better to be safe than sorry.

A lot of programs will email you when a new virus appears and offer the appropriate update as part of their service.

Whatever you do, don’t leave it until tomorrow. Tomorrow may be too late.

Do it now and sleep easy. Viruses have been known to cause nightmares.

All the best. Bob…

About The Author

Robert earns his crust by targeting the thousands of newcomers to internet trading. He aims to cut their learning curve to enable them to start earning money from the word go.

He learned the hard way. You can learn the easy way.

Checkout his website. It’s not posh. It’s not perfect, but it is effective. http://www.learn-and-earn-now.co.uk/

bestdeals@farey.fsbusiness.co.uk

So adult sex toy are on the lips of every chick these days, either speaking about them in the web chats, at the work kitchen or on the telly. But which adult sex toy is the fav, with the great choice to select from surely a sex toy researcher had to find out the best one.

A new organisation asked over one hundred and sixty UK women in June what their top adult sex toy was along with other personal questions.

If you love sex toys you should try out Anal Toys

It was found that the most top adult sex toy for UK women was the vibrator, and they just liked it! Ladies were so excited by the idea of a massive vibrator that many of them would use it straight after coming home from work. The best models of vibrator were the Jessica rabbit vibrators as they help to stimulate the clit as well as inserting into the love tunnel.

The 2nd most popular adult sex toy was the exciting dildo. Dildos are similar to vibrators except they don?t have batteries or vibrate. Dildos come in all shapes and sizes from nine inches to twelve inches. They can come with suction cups to have a super experience hands free and can easily attach to a bath or toilet set. Dildos have been a firm fav since the 90s and looks like they will be around for a long time.

So it was decided that the vibrator was the winner and the dildo came in second place, with some many sex toys out there it was difficult to know which type of vibrator was the most exciting for women to try. The classic vibrators are battery powered and shaped like a male’s penis. Standard vibrators are shaped just like the proper thing and use batteries for power. Stardard vibrators can be made up of plastic, vinyl metal or silicone. Stardard vibrators can either be slipped in or placed against your vagina to get the feel. Sex bomb stock a wide range of classic vibrators.

The easiest way to use classic vibrators is to make sure it is germ free before use, make sure it is not too large for your vagina, and also make sure that you do not use it every Saturday night and you do venture out on a date to the disco.

The components of a successful sales performance management system include first of all having well defined revenue plans and revenue and margin objectives. Often times, this includes having bookings objectives for your individual sales people. Having well defined sales territories relating to those targets. And of course, having a strong, well documented plan, in terms of who your target markets and customers are within your territories.

In addition to having a revenue plan, other components of the sales performance management system include a job description that is expectation based where the outcomes are clearly defined are very important in terms of overall requirements for success in the job.

The next component of successful sales performance management system is actually having individual revenue margin and booking objectives for each of your people. Typically, this is done an annualize basis with your people going through a planning cycle once you’ve defined your overall company’s revenue plans. You should put together targets, annual revenue and bookings goals for each of your salespeople that are tied to that overall revenue plan. And often times you’ll be doing a measuring and monitoring of performance relative to those actual revenue goals systematically on a monthly or quarterly basis in addition to that.

The next element of a successful sales performance management system is having an annual territory plan that your salespeople are working towards. This territory plan should be developed in concert with sales management in your sales people and it should list not only your major objects but also key accounts that you’re targeting, the strategies to get into those accounts, should probably have a section about both new business development as well as account maintenance or account management and also have a section related to actual channel management strategies that your sales people are going to be carrying out. This is a once page document that can be put together in a template and passed out to your sales people and used as a tool for them to conduct annual sales planning.

Again, having a plan in place allows you to use that plan as a tool for measuring and monitoring performance against that plan and having ongoing discussions with your sales people related to how they’re progressing against the objectives and the overall plan that they’ve set at the outset of the year.

The next element of a successful sales performance management system has nothing to do with actual goals objectives or plans, but everything to do with sales management’s role in working with individuals on the sales team. This is the most critical element. Sales people are only as good as they are being managed by sales management. A lot of companies expect sales people to be left at their own devices, but just like any other team, sales people need to be managed and the foundation for that, of course, is having somebody in place in your sales management function who is willing to work closely with their people.

The role of sales management in developing and using a sales performance management system is probably most principally based upon the notion of sales management working closely with sales team members on an on going basis and establishing a relationship of trust, confidence, and mentorship. And that relationship built between sales management and its team is fundamental to empowering sales people to be successful in their jobs.

The role of sales management is to track sales activity and measure and monitor performance and to coach sales people to success. Tracking activity can be done very easily when your company has a successful CRM implementation. We use salesforce.com to develop customized dashboards that give management a quick snapshot of each of their sales people’s activity in terms of amount of prospecting, amount of actual account qualification and actually being able to measure and track the activity of the sales people as it relates to moving deals through the actual sales process towards close.

Measuring and monitoring performance isn’t just about really tracking activity but in a deeper sense, getting behind the activity to understand what it is that’s working and what’s not working with each sales person’s territory. A good example of that is working with accounts. Is the sales person doing a good job of mapping out an actual customer prospect, in terms of people, decision makers, influencers and decision making processa and then working hard in order to touch all the bases to develop and advance the sale with all of the different constituents inside a specific account. This is where sales management needs to work deeply to measure and monitor sales performance and this is not a trivial task. It requires active engagement from sales management in order to do this.

Another foundation of good sales management, of course, is coaching your people to success. There is all sorts of schools of thoughts out there about how to best work with people but in this day and age, which is one of empowerment, people want to feel like they’re involved in the decision making processes of their job. They want to feel like their opinion is heard by management. So a more enlightened approach to coaching your people today in today’s management environment is really working with sales people to help them to understand and reach their own conclusions about how they can improve their sales performance.

Coaching requires active engagement which requires in turn, time spent seriously involved in a sales person’s day to day, week to week routine activities. There’s a number of different ways to do this, of course. The most effective way is spending one on one time with your sales people in the field actually visiting accounts, strategizing them, talking about and preparing for sales calls, going on those sales calls and then debriefing after those sales calls to talk about what happened, what was learned and how could the sales call have been improved. Most sales people learn by doing, and so the active coaching is the art of getting out with your people into the field and then actually working with them to help them to understand how they can enhance their sales performance and their sales technique.

Another element, in addition to regular sales visits, is frequent phone contact with your sales people just to check in with them to find out how things are going, and frequent informal discussions with sales people to just show them that you care and also giving them feedback on problems and challenges that they are facing on specific accounts as they raise those issues to you. Knowing which accounts your sales people are working on is the foundation for asking them questions on a regular basis about how things are going on those accounts and showing your sales people that you are actually engaged with them in an active relationship and are interested in helping them to find ways to win. When your sales people win, your company wins.

Yet another element is holding regular sales meetings. Some companies only do this on a very infrequent basis and the sales meeting should be a primary component of your sales performance management system. By formalizing sales meetings and holding them on a regular basis, you’re showing your sales team that you’re creating an environment of accountability and information exchange. Sales meetings can be used for a number of purposes including information gathering, finding out how your sales team members are performing.

Providing training for your sales people which is very important. Providing ongoing sales training is a way to make sure that your sales people are always sharpening their saw and that you’re giving them the latest tools in order to improve their sales performance. So typically, we work on sales technique training as well as product training and customer and market training as well. Other things to do in sales meetings include providing recognition incentives and rewards, taking time in your sales meetings to praise and celebrate the successes of your people is a great way of showing them that you really do care about their performance and you’re willing to celebrate those success and give them recognition and rewards as appropriate for the successes that they have. So holding sales meetings is an important part of making sure that you have a motivated, high performance sales team that’s working together and is accountable for its activities.

The more that sales people understand that they are accountable for producing themselves and are held accountable through these different vehicles that we’ve talked about the better your sales performance is going to be from your people. So building and deploying a successful sales performance management system is something that a company cannot live without and needs to be taken very seriously.

Of course the best sales performance system is only as good as the people who are running it and when it comes right down to it, running a high performance sales team is all about good leadership. What is good leadership? That’s not the subject that I want to cover here but I certainly do want to say this: Leadership is about passion, about vision, about connectedness, about motivating people, about finding out what it is that unlocks the door to people’s special performance and help8ing them to realize, open that door and go there. So in some way, building a successful sales performance management system is a key to accelerating your company’s sales and as your organization continues to grow, it becomes more important in order to achieve high performance scalability and repeatability in your processes.

About Cube Management
Cube Management (http://www.cubemanagement.com) provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results. Read the Cube Sales Blog

There is tremendous power in writing your own articles. Let me briefly explain this for you if you are not already aware. Let’s say that you have a website promoting one or many different products. You could have the best website and the best products available today but you know as well as I do that that doesn’t mean a thing if no one sees that website. So instead of going out and joining thousands of safelists and posting to tons of FFA pages, which are just a couple of methods many still use today with very little or no success, I want you to try a different method.

Lets say your website sales a product for people who play golf. For this example, lets pretend it’s some new type of golf club to improve your swing. You can develop what the top 5% of internet marketers create and that is called a “pre-sell” page. It can be a personal recommendation for using the product giving examples of how it worked for you and you might want to include a little history about yourself like how long you have played the sport and things you have tried in the past etc. etc… Build a little bit of a rapport with the prospective customer. Let them begin to get to know you and trust you. But never ever make it sound like you are selling something and do not mention a price.

You might try including a link casually within your conversation which will actually be a link to your website. Your customers will be much more inclined to buy from you since they didn’t feel like you were trying to “sale” them. You may have mentioned something in your story that they could relate to.

Now once this page is set up, you will want to start writing your articles. I would recommend 10-20 a day if you can. Go through your website and start picking out keywords that you feel someone would try to search for. Build your articles on those keywords. So a keyword could be “Golf Swing”. You will want that in the beginning of your title (this will help in the search engine rankings and also to be picked by others who will want to publish your article). Your title could be Golf Swing Tips or Golf Swing Improvement, something to that effect.

Make sure you continue to use your keywords throughout your article but do not overdo it.

I have personally been using these techniques among a couple others to see a difference in my website traffic and my sales.

To learn more about this technique and others that Olivia has been using very effectively, you may go to http://www.oliviamarie.info

If a fast paced and exciting mystery is what you yearn for, “Under Cloak of Darkness” will give you everything you desire, and more. I love how author, I. Michael Koontz, has taken his lifelong, passionate interest in Cold War espionage and military history and put together such a well-written and thoroughly researched fictional tale. Without a doubt, the reader will be zealously turning pages to untwist the intense plot.

“Under Cloak of Darkness” takes place about 50 years ago and is about a former FBI agent named John Apparite who is a huge fanatic of the Washington Senators baseball team. He now decides to join the most covert espionage program in existence with the promise of global travel, high pay and higher stakes. There can be no turning back once the commitment has been made, and complete secrecy is of major importance. Breaking the covenant of secrecy is immediate death. Many lives are dependent upon the outcome of the planned missions. The espionage program requires emotional detachment, learning to fight hand to hand combat, and mastery of the use of weapons. Apparite, who is known as Agent E, is given some very difficult tests to prove to his supervisor, the Director, of his readiness to progress to the mission he was hired to perform.

Apparite is given a testing mission, and the goal will be to engage a barroom brawl while single handedly leaving everyone in the bar unconscious. The additional challenge is that no one is to be killed, if possible. Once this test task is successfully completed, Apparite is given his real mission. The American Scientist, Robert Kramer, is developing a portable solid rocket-fuel which is used to fire nuclear warheads from submarines, and the Soviets are trying to get Kramer’s missile secrets for themselves. Apparite’s mission is to kill Kramer, assume his identity, and trick the Soviets. I don’t want to reveal too much, but the adventure really takes off and never slows down with action and excitement on every page. All I can say is that one must read the book to feel the complete intensity generated in the ambience of the story. Knowing a friend from an enemy becomes almost impossible, thus the danger is extreme. Often time, the only thing to temporarily relieve Apparite from his stressful predicament is his love for the Washington Senators.

What makes the story so unique is the personality of John Apparite and the relationship between himself, the Director, and Agent J. The required aloofness demanded of Apparite begins to take its toll, and we realize he has limitations and misgivings about killing others. He truly has human qualities after all! But, if Apparite shares these concerns, he must die. The demanded detachment becomes even more difficult when Apparite finds himself attracted to the pretty brunette stewardess on the flight to London, especially when he sees her a second time. Apparite becomes confused when his instinct to help another human being interferes with what he has been taught. Could not helping another have resulted in a best friend and colleague remaining alive?

Koontz obviously did research on the historic locations Apparite visited and the numerous facts and figures scattered throughout the pages of “Under Cloak of Darkness.” The descriptions of the British Museum and the famous Reading Room were enticing, as were the visits to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

I have never thought of myself as being much of a fan of a thriller novel such as “Under Cloak of Darkness,” but I have now changed my mind. Except for some parts which were a bit gruesome for my taste, but which unfortunately are probably only too accurate, I LOVED reading this story. “Under Cloak of Darkness” is not for the meek, but if you like mystery, Cold War, and politics, I predict you will love it too! Personally, I found myself as entertained reading Koontz’s work as I was when I read “The DaVinci Code.” I definitely look forward to the next book in this series on the adventures of John Apparite that I. Michael Koontz has promised us! I can hardly wait! This is definitely a must read!

Under Cloak of Darkness: The Story of John Apparite
I. Michael Koontz
Five Star Publishing (2006)
ISBN 1594144311
Reviewed by Kelli Glesige for Reader Views (5/06)